ABs back three all class

odd blunder. Maybe it helps when the average age is 23. No sooner had Milner-Skudder dropped the ball, than he was up the other end of the pitch scoring. Again it was rush defence.

A little earlier Ioane had come in off his wing and jammed Jesse Kriel. Now Milner-Skudder stepped in and made the interception. He was run down by Courtnall Skosan but made the pass to Beauden Barrett who was up in support. Barrett would have made the line himself if he had gone with gas straight to the outside. But who cares, when the alternative was a cheeky flick out the back to Milner-Skudder for the try.

Admittedly South Africa were a rabble. Why on earth they didn’t employ a rush defence when they have seen how the All Blacks have struggled is anyone’s guess. But Barrett didn’t mind. He had all the time in the world to embarrass South Africa’s wide defence with a cross kick.

It is coming to something when a back is beaten in the air by a hooker. The contrast between the back three of the two teams could scarcely have been greater. Did Andries Coetzee make a tackle. Ho hum, another lovely flick from Milner-Skudder put in Scott Barrett for a try.

McKenzie’s kicking game off either foot was top class and gave the All Blacks some field position that they don’t always get from their principal playmakers, but on this night the 20-year-old Ioane was the terror of the Boks.

Ioane made a fool of Raymond Rhule who had no idea how to defend him. Ioane went round him, over him and inside him. Ioane could probably have even hurdled Rhule if it had taken his fancy. In setting up Brodie Retallick’s try he left four Boks on the floor.

Just a note to the selectors. Ioane is a wing and McKenzie is a fullback. They are New Zealand rugby’s scorched earth policy. They are the future. And the future is fast. OPINION: The biggest sea change in the biggest issue facing rugby ( and all other contact sports) is happening right now in England, but you barely hear or read a word about it.

Concussion, and its often deadly after-effects, used to be treated almost as a joke. It took a stern warning from a neurosurgeon in 1987 to persuade Jock Hobbs, later the chairman of the NZRU, to stop playing after the latest of a series of concussions left him feeling sick for days.

Attitudes have changed, but a major problem still is that diagnosing concussion may well be, as one very experienced sports medicine expert said to me this week, ‘‘an art masquerading as science.’’

However, at the moment, in England, players in the two top club competitions, the premiership and the championship, are involved in a trial of a saliva test that could transform how concussion is dealt with.

According to the head of a research team at the University of Birmingham, Professor Tony Belli, his group ‘‘recently made a significant breakthrough after identifying molecules, which can be found in saliva, and act as biomarkers to indicate whether the brain has suffered injury.’’

If the trials prove him correct, this is as important in detecting concussion as the announcement in 1953 by Dr Jonas Salk that he had discovered a guaranteed vaccine was in the prevention of polio.

In the United States in May it was announced trials at the Penn State College of Medicine of children suffering from concussion showed that saliva tests were 20 per cent more accurate than current methods in predicting longterm concussion effects.

Currently, with all the best intentions in the world, there is no recognised, guaranteed, scientific test anywhere in the world to determine whether a player is fit to rejoin a game after a head knock.

Don’t take my word for it. Dr Simon Kemp, the chief medical officer for England rugby, says there is no objective test for the diagnosis of concussion, and ‘‘this lack of objectivity is the biggest challenge facing a medical professional in dealing with this type of injury.’’

What happens at the moment? At higher levels in the game, like test matches and professional competitions, the world baseline is a test called Scat (Standardised Concussion Assessment Tool) 3, usually administered by a doctor.

A player who’s left the field after a knock for a Scat3 test will be checked in a number of ways. Some are patently subjective. Is the player slurring his or her words? Does the player’s gait look unsteady walking away from, and then towards, the tester?

Another section involves the player having to recall five simple words (like cat, pen, shoe, book, car) in order, recite the months of the year backwards (starting with a random month, not December), and remember a series of numbers well enough to say them in reverse order.

A dark concussion test joke from the past started with a trainer holding his open hand in a player’s face. ‘‘How many fingers do you see?’’ ‘‘Three.’’ ‘‘Near enough, out you go.’’ As can be seen, the level of genuine difficulty in Scat3’s questions is far from a joke.

Testing enough, you’d think, to eliminate the serious cases. But even experts say they sometimes still have to rely on instinct.

‘‘I once had a player get everything right in the test,’’ a sports doctor told me, ‘‘but he just didn’t seem right, so I wouldn’t let him back on. Later that night he came to me and said, ‘You were right to take me off. I’ve got a headache I can’t get rid of’.’’

A player will lie to get back in the game.’

Human nature dictates that some doctors or team officials will be responsible and cautious, but you’d reasonably fear that some will be reckless.

It’s especially hard when a player is desperate to get back inkto the game. In the guidelines to Scat3 there’s a paragraph which, when you skirt around the politically delicate phrasing, boils down to this: ‘‘Be aware a player will lie to get back in the game.’’

At lower levels in rugby the questions in a checklist is more basic. ‘‘What ground are we at?’’ ‘‘Who are you marking?’’ ‘‘Which half is it?’’ ‘‘What’s the score?’’ Officials are also asked to check for unsteadiness, double vision, a headache, or nausea.

All fair issues but ask yourself, if it was your son or daughter playing, which would you feel most comfortable about? A series of questions and observations, usually posed, in the amateur game, by a person with little, or no, medical training, or a small device a player spits into which gives a scientific answer in a matter of minutes?

‘‘It (the saliva test) hasn’t been proven yet,’’ says one veteran rugby doctor, ‘‘but if it works, then there wouldn’t be a single person in sports medicine who didn’t see it as a very big deal.’’